


The Cold Acre

by allredpen



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Dirty Talk, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Sharing a Bed, just like a lot of gardening, off-grid and poly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:34:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27333508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allredpen/pseuds/allredpen
Summary: What's the apocalypse compared to sharing a bed at the end of the world with your two best friends, and falling in love under a dogwood tree.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej, Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej/Sara Rubin, Shane Madej/Sara Rubin
Comments: 35
Kudos: 78
Collections: Skeptic Believer Book Club Hallowe'en Fic Exchange 2020





	The Cold Acre

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sarcasticfishes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarcasticfishes/gifts).



> Fie, your prompts were so juicy and brilliant that I drafted two fics from them.  
> In the spirit of knowing very well what your particular cup of tea is, I chose to flesh out this one, some Shyanara in a cabin at the end of the world. Really, this prompt was perfect for a SMASHR fic, but I wasn’t sure I had the chops for that. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy what I’ve pulled together. 
> 
> I doubt there’s a single person reading this fic who hasn’t read  
> [Fie’s](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarcasticfishes/pseuds/sarcasticfishes) Shyanara fics, but their skill is unmatched so please go read or re-read.

—

_Fall_

For the end of the world, Sara thought it could definitely have been worse. She lay back on her little patch of soft white clover at what felt like the edge of the universe, and tipped her face to catch the sun. Sara was under the dogwood tree, and if she strained, she could hear low talking and laughter from around the back of the cabin, accompanied by the steady thud of axe on wood. If Sara felt the inclination to get up and wander over to them, she knew that she would find Shane leaning back on a lawn chair, spouting commentary to rile Ryan up. The only other sound Sara could hear was the faint chatting of the hens, and distant, indistinct birdsong. 

This was paradise, really. Paradise at the end of the world, and she had nothing to complain about.

Except, of course, for the fucking aphids. Aphids on her swiss chard, aphids on her potatoes, aphids on her beets. And suddenly she remembered why she was under the dogwood in the first place, before she’d succumbed to the unseasonably warm afternoon and the soft growth of clover that covered almost the entire property down to the banks of the river; She was here for the ladybugs. She’d seen three around here in recent weeks, but they seemed lost, never finding their way to her vegetable garden and its endless feast of delicious aphids upon which they could gorge. 

Today, nothing. She would have to do what she’d been doing all month, and crawl amongst her precious crops, and crush those little aphid bastards with her bare hands. 

But first, she was going to tip the very last of their tin of coffee beans into the grinder, and make the most of their last pot of coffee for this month.

Sara stepped through the worn old door and into the large central room that was her kitchen, her living area, and her bedroom, all shared with Shane and Ryan. It was cool enough in the cabin to raise Sara’s hairs on end, even as she crept toward the hearth. The cold tended to seep up through the flagstones from the compacted dirt below, and Sara could forever be found no more than five feet from the wood burning stove. She opened that stove up now to peer in at the burning logs. They had, she thought, another hour or two from this fuel, another day from what was piled next to the hearth, another week stacked neatly against the back of the cabin, out of the rain. 

There was a lightbulb above the kitchen bench, but Sara left it off; better to save that energy for the water pump and their morning baths, particularly as winter crept up on them. They’d no idea if the sun in this cool, overcast part of the world would do to their energy production in the winter months, but they planned to fill the batteries and never find out just how miserable they would get without their little spark of electricity. 

Out the window Sara could watch the boys, who had given up on processing wood entirely, and were now just having a heated discussion. There was playful shoving, and wild gesticulation. Sara’s heart was warm.

—

_Spring_

They were already too far north when the call came through from Ryan’s dad that the borders to the city were closing. If Shane was remembering right — not a guarantee, given those early days and weeks were often blurred, not so much memories as feelings, a slurry of fear and despair — that was also the very last phone call any of them received. 

Despite his vague memories of those early days, Shane could recall Ryan’s face perfectly, the way he stilled, his knuckles going white on the steering wheel. Shane had turned to exchange a look with Sara in the back seat and knew she was thinking exactly what Shane was thinking. 

“We can go back,” he told Ryan, eyes still locked on Sara, hoping she would read his plea for forgiveness. “We’ll turn around, we still have time.” 

Ryan released the handbrake and jerked the car off the verge, where they’d been parked for the duration of the call. “No. We can’t,” he replied, his voice thick. 

“Ryan-”

“We can’t turn back,” Ryan said sharply. “I won’t do that to you.”

“ _You_ could-” Sara started. “We’ll- Shane and I can keep going on foot, or-”

“Dad made me promise. We’ll keep going.”

Ryan had driven them over the border in the first place, had turned up to their place in Steve Bergara’s Jeep during the worst of the riots. He’d been vibrating out of his shoes with panic when they opened the door to him. 

“Surely we have ten minutes, Ry,” Sara had said, and she’d been the one to rub his back, to sit cross legged with him on the rug, knee-to-knee, while Shane stood in the kitchen with a handful of herbal tea bags, filled the kettle, tried to slow his own heart down. 

It took 40 minutes, in the end, to pull Ryan back from the brink of hyperventilation, pack some food, clothes, to haul an urn of clean water into the car. Ryan locked the car doors and started driving north. 

They drove in silence for two hours at a snail’s pace. 20 miles per hour in the sun, with the air off to save gas, and Ryan cried for long stretches of it. Either tears dripping as if from an open tap down his cheeks and off his chin, or dry, silent, gasping sobs. 

Shane felt useless, lower than a worm, sitting stiffly in the passenger seat, looking straight out to the road. 

“I can drive, you-” he’d tried, once, but-

“No.” 

So Shane curled in on himself a little more, hated himself. 

Sara, though, she unbuckled her seatbelt — _“how much damage would we really take at this speed?” —_ and pressed to the back of Ryan’s seat, rested her chin near his shoulder, put her little hands in his hair, and whispered nonsense in his ear. She was so good with Ryan’s particular brand of torrential emotion, always knew exactly what to do with him. Shane only ever felt like he was calming a spooked horse when it came to Ryan; lowering his voice, laying a single hand on Ryan’s back. What was stopping him from doing what Sara did, really — the way she folded him up in her arms, and cooed until he was embarrassed, and smiling, and pushing back at her. Sara was more physically demonstrative with Ryan than she was with anyone. More even than with Shane, who sometimes needed more talk than touch. With Ryan, she seemed to know that he needed an anchor, and that anchor was sometimes her hand on his arm, or placed over his cheek. 

They drove and drove for hours; hugging the coast at a crawl. There had been no group discussion on a route, no mapping, no planning. Ryan knew a place, and Ryan started driving, and no one felt like having a big talk about it, and Shane was just grateful they were even moving;

“The I-5 is a parking lot,” said one guy at a rest stop near Salinas, before they’d crossed the border. He was perched on his bike, sweating in black leathers, and he pointed at them. “Can’t move forward, can’t move back. It’s a death trap. Don’t risk it.” 

After the first day, they started driving by night, and sleeping by day, huddled together in the trunk of the Jeep. Shane felt like both a sardine and a sitting duck, exposed and vulnerable every time they stopped, but too exhausted to do anything other than crawl back to curl up, make himself as small as he could across the folded down rear seats. 

And despite his utter exhaustion, Shane never fell asleep straight away. He almost began to believe in astral projection during that time, as he lay there, arms around Sara, Sara’s arms around Ryan, and wished himself away from this hellish highway-side bedroom in broad daylight. He imagined them instead in a clearing, atop soft underbrush, tall trees giving cover on a warm day, dappling the light across their faces. He imagined the three of them there, imagined a peaceful quiet so distinct from the tense silence of this Jeep, parked on a shoulder on The 1, as a Californian Flight limped north in struggling motorcars past their window. 

It wasn’t just them and half of living Los Angeles who’d made it over the border in time, either; regular pre-recorded announcements punctuated the radio’s automatic broadcast playlist, urging motorists to stay in their vehicles. Keep their windows up. Do not stop to aid the injured or the dead. Keep away from blood, saliva. Shane did not look in the rear view at first, and let his imagination run away with the image of a shambling horde taking up in the rear, ready to catch up at the next traffic jam.

They cut east before they reached San Jose. That was where so many of the cars around them were headed in search of sanctuary behind high, hastily constructed walls. Shane knew better than to imagine Silicon Valley opening its arms to them. They knew they’d be ferried past, pushed north into a bottleneck, and Shane had no desire to die on the Golden Gate Bridge. 

So they cut east, then pushed north, crossed the border to Oregon just before it slammed shut behind them too, and here Shane finally remembered what it was like to breathe, as the cars thinned out, and they could build speed. They barely had to stop the car from this point on, except to join another party in pushing the occasional abandoned car off the road. Shane wound his window down for the first time since they left LA.

“I’m starting to think we might actually make it,” Ryan said, and smiled so bright that Shane could barely look at him straight. Sara leaned over the centre console, propped on her elbows and started flicking through radio channels. Every single channel played 1999’s Butterfly on repeat under the deathly serious emergency broadcast. It set Sara off laughing, which set Shane and Ryan off, and they laughed breathlessly for far too long, caught up in a mania, tears streaming down their faces. 

“I’m starting to think we’ll make it, too,” Shane said, when they could all breathe again. He dropped his hand over Sara’s hand where she gripped Ryan’s forearm. 

Maggie was a great-aunt’s ex-wife on Ryan’s dad’s side. She was an odd duck, as Ryan had described it, but had liked Steven, had invited him and the family up to her cabin when Ryan and Jake were little kids. Ryan said she was eccentric, paranoid, and wealthy. 

_‘Was’_ , because she’d been in Nevada when it started, had been there when they’d circled the whole state in a ring of steel, trapped them in. ‘ _Was’_ because Nevada had been silent for a long time now. A month, maybe more, so when they finally made it, the gated driveway was almost invisible, blanketed in creeping vines of kudzu. 

They tumbled out of the Jeep deliriously. 

“Should we try and drive up to it?” Asked Sara. “What if there’s someone in there, and we need to leave quickly.”

“Does it look like someone got to this before us?” Ryan waved an arm at the kudzu, the knee-high weeds in the road. 

“I think she means _someone_ ,” Shane said. Ryan didn’t respond, he just retrieved a tyre iron from the trunk, and shrugged. 

Shane didn’t _want_ to leave quickly, anyway. It was quiet here, but for the sound of the river and a faint buzzing. He picked up a stick, marched up to the bank of kudzu, and began prying it back from the gate.

There were no _someones_ on the property, not as far as Shane could see. Just over the gate were four hens and a rooster with a brood of little chicks running about their feet, picking peacefully at the clover grass. The faint buzz was from a cloud of honeybees on a wild overgrown bush of lavender. Beyond, the drive curved right back toward the river, and at the end of it sat a squat little log cabin, dwarfed by a vast, old, overgrown flowering dogwood tree. 

They stood, all three, shoulder to shoulder in the quiet afternoon. Alone, finally, with no one to see their eyes grow wet. 

— 

_Summer_

“Shane!”

“Sara?”

Ryan struggled to sit up in the hammock and shielded his eyes against the sun to peer at the direction of the yelling. He flailed around for the machete Sara made them take when they came to the far end of the property, and found its handle only as he tipped over onto the ground. 

Ryan hadn’t heard the perimeter alarms trip, but they weren’t exactly state-of-the-art, and worse, they hadn’t yet been tested, unless you counted Shane doing his best imitation of a corpse and pretending to stumble through them.

Ryan took off running back to the cabin, fear gripping his heart, and skidded to a halt when he saw them. He stood, puffed, at the edge of the vegetable patch and watched in disbelief as Sara and Shane squabbled on their hands and knees in the freshly turned dirt. 

“The bigger it gets, the less flavor, and the fewer nutrients, Shane,”

“That’s not true, Sara, and we need to think about quantity, so this here little family can make it through the long frosty-”

“ _Please_ stop doing the prospector voice, it doesn’t even make sense in this context-”

“What the fuck, guys,” Ryan said faintly. Their heads snapped to him. “I thought you were being attacked, I thought…”

“I _am_ being attacked, Ryry,” Shane said. “Attacked by terrible opinions about the best time to pick a cucumber.”

Sara had the decency to look a little sorry. 

“Sorry, Ryan. You know how we get about gardening, even if it is just a shitty little pumpkin patch.”

But looking around himself, Ryan knew that wasn’t true; in the last few months, Sara and Shane had tripled the size of Maggie’s old kitchen garden. They seemed to have taken their knowledge of caring for windowsill culinary herbs, and combined it with an ancient, crumbling gardening book Maggie kept on a bench next to the front door, and created a kind of miracle. 

Ryan, on the other hand, had spent three months moping, getting in the way, and being the least useful third wheel in history. 

He wished he could express this, wished they would just tell him to be better, straight-up, wished they would order him into menial tasks so at least he could feel useful for once. 

“It’s not a shitty little pumpkin patch,” Ryan said instead. “You haven’t even managed to grow pumpkins in it yet, so it’s really a shitty little cucumber patch.”

He got a pat of wet mud right to the shoulder for that, which turned into an outright mud fight, which turned into Sara lecturing them about tracking mud in the front door, even though she’d been the first to fire. 

It helped him to forget, just for a little while. 

— 

_Fall_

Sara crouched at the outer gate with a bell and the Extra Long Extra Sharp Fire Poker and waited, her eyes fixed to the line of felled trees that punctuated the washed-out gray asphalt. 

Due west, down the small road that curved gently until it met the Siuslaw River and they both meandered west toward the coast. She hated this job, waiting out here in the road, far from the peaceful bubble of safety they had created in the cabin, but she hadn’t had much of a choice.

Shane had sat up that morning with a start, dislodging Sara, causing her to elbow Ryan in the chest.

“It’s the 3rd Wednesday today.”

“Is it?” Sara rubbed her eyes. “Already?” 

Ryan had already sprung out of bed — he never allowed himself the singular pleasure of lingering in bed over their shitty coffees on a cool morning — and was checking their makeshift calendar. 

“Yep, he’s right,” he said, and held out his hand. “Rock, paper, scissors then.”

Which is how Sara landed the unlikely honour of stepping carefully around their sophisticated can-and-string perimeter alarms and standing out in the road to watch for their one contact with the outside world. 

Jack Young was alone this time, though he wasn’t always, and he came ‘round the corner on a strapping chestnut stallion. Sara stepped out into the road with her eyebrows raised as he approached. 

“Jackie, hey. Where the fuck did you find a horse?” She asked, though she knew he’d never tell her a thing. Better to hide his sources and keep his trade route alive. 

He laughed heartily as he slid down off the horse’s back, but as expected, didn’t answer. 

“It’s good to see you well, Sara.”

Jackie Young was a short, well-built man with a square face split all over with laugh lines. Sara had never seen him out of his worn jeans, black shirt, and steel-caps and Stetson. If Sara had to guess — and she did have to guess, because he’d never tell them — she’d say he was 50, or 45 with a lot of sun. She knew this much: he’d grown up on the Warm Springs Reservation in Jefferson County, east of them. He’d been a civil engineer before, though he’d obviously spent just as much time on the land, and working with animals, hiking, and cooking and becoming an expert in all manner of other things. Nowadays, he trekked back and forth from Warm Springs to Yachats, trading and procuring all manner of items. Sara had heard stories — mostly from Jackie — of the lawlessness of the roads, but Jack seemed to be immune to it. Sara thought they were stories he told through a combination of hyperbole and professional savvy. 

“Didn’t bring JJ and Rayna?” Sara asked. His 12 and 14 year-old kids were a semi-regular feature of Jack’s visits. “We’ve got a new clutch of chicks for them to play with.” 

“Hm,” Jack bent over a saddle bag, his face hidden under the brim of his hat. “Getting a bit dangerous for them.” 

“Oh?” 

“You weren’t the only things that blew north on the wind,” Jack said, and as he straightened up Sara saw no trace of the usual glibness in his face. Sara felt sick, suddenly, nauseous and fearful, and desperate to get back to the cabin. 

“Come on Jackie, the dogwood’s full of berries.”

The dogwood tree was the reason Jack Young had found them in the first place, back in the beginning. There weren’t too many of such size and health around, and he’d come to take bark from this dogwood when it still belonged to Maggie. He’d been surprised, of course, the first time he’d jumped the gate to find the three of them falling out of the cabin door with makeshift weapons — Extra Long Extra Sharp Fire Poker, Maggie’s Old Crossbow, and Knife — but not surprised enough to refrain from laughing in their faces. 

Jack added them to his trade route, after that. he always carefully harvested the dogwood bark for medicinal purposes, but he normally left with all kinds of other bits and pieces from their garden. In exchange, he brought them things they weren’t sure they’d ever see again; wine, chocolate, and perhaps most importantly ibuprofen for their aching bodies that were unused to the amount of physical labor that was required of them to keep the cabin and gardens going. 

Sara thought the thing he brought that was most valuable, though, was news. 

“Folks in Yachats say Canada has finally started letting people through up there.” 

“I met someone on the road who escaped Eugene, and he said the National Guard is still up and running in there, but they’ve formed a kind of splinter state.”

Sara waited with trepidation for the day Jack came with news of an infestation. Worse, she feared a Wednesday he didn’t turn up with news at all. 

— 

The first few times Jack brought them little luxuries, Ryan’s hands shook too much to even touch them. When Jack came through during those early months, every drop of water they drank felt more precious than the most expensive wine, and wine was so outrageous they couldn’t do anything other than tuck it in a cupboard behind the quilts, hoarding bottles of wine with bars of chocolate and real soap. 

Anyway, they’d never asked him for any of it. It had been the spare parts they needed from him at first, of course; they had a cracked and faulty junction box on their solar panels, they needed a bit of copper to fix their wood stove water heater. Whatever they requested, by the following month, Jack managed to source all of it, or at least bring a usable substitute. More than that, he often wandered into the cabin to peer around and make suggestions for improvements. They’d been so frightened the first time, so sure he was there to take away the fragile peace they’d found here. It was absurd to Ryan, now. Jackie was enterprising, but he was the friendliest sort of guy, and even though he always came away from the cabin laden with their eggs, game, vegetables, cuttings, and dogwood bark, he seemed to take as much pleasure in inspecting the cabin for shortcomings. 

“You need to shove something in that window frame,” Jack would say. “You’re letting out so much heat.” 

“You need a cow,” he proclaimed out of nowhere one month, while he waited for Shane to brew him a coffee. 

“A cow,” Shane repeated wearily. “Why’s that, Jackie?”

“ _‘Why’s that?_ ’” Jack scoffed. “Milk, stupid. Milk, butter, cheese.” 

“I _do_ miss butter,” Sara said dreamily from her perch on the counter next to Shane. The sun was low, and it caught in her curls like dew on spiderwebs. Ryan looked away. 

“If you come up the road with a cow one day, Jackie,” Sara laughed. “I’ll let you marry me on the spot.” 

“Let me take the dogwood for a dowry and I’m in.”

These days, they had no compunctions about taking Jack’s wine, and drinking it like water. They waved him off from under the dogwood with Maggie’s plastic tumblers in hand — she’d been a very practical woman, and saw no sense in having breakables in a remote cabin — and proceeded to get riotously drunk. Maggie kept a record player in the cabin, and it seemed to use stunningly little power. Even though she only had about five records, and even though they’d listened to each a dozen times, they still cheered at each new song, and spun each other around the room. 

It was mostly Elvis, but she had a bit of Prince too. 

They drank, and danced, and when they got too tired they curled up in bed and read excerpts from one of Maggie’s raunchy detective novels and sent each other to sleep. 

—

It didn’t take 10 months of cohabitation with Ryan for Sara to figure him out. She’d figured Ryan out maybe 10 minutes after they met, seven years ago. Ryan was particularly obvious when he was being squirrelly, and today the man had gone full squirrel. 

He’d launched out of their bed when they woke, yanking on his old jeans before Sara had even considered rolling out of bed to brew coffee. 

“I’m gonna go down the river and fish,” he said, with a nonchalance so transparently feigned as to be hysterical. “I think I saw some late season salmon down…” He gestured vaguely east, where the river ran faster and the woods were thicker. “Jumping all over the place, out of the river. Heaps- loads of them.”

“Okay,” Shane said, sitting up in bed and furrowing his brow at Ryan. “Well… Okay. Be safe.”

Sara thought back to yesterday, when she’d tried not to doze off after lunch under the tree with her head in Ryan’s lap while they idly watched Shane repair shingles on the cabin’s roof. 

“I should be doing that,” Ryan had said suddenly, shifting under Sara’s head. 

“What?” She rolled so she could look up at Ryan’s face. He looked back with a faint blush. He looked frustrated. “It’s Shane’s turn, Ryan.”

“I know, but-” he drew a deep breath. “I’m sure you’d like some time alone.”

“I don’t know how we could be more alone out here, Ryan.”

“I meant time with Shane _,_ ” Ryan grew redder and more frustrated by the minute, but Sara couldn’t bear to put him out of his misery yet. 

“I see Shane every day. Every hour, just about.”

“I meant _alone. With_ Shane.”

So Sara knew exactly what this was about, and as soon as the door fell shut behind Ryan, she turned laughing to Shane.

“So,” She said. “Ryan’s diagnosed us with sexual frustration from never having any time alone, and has left us here to-”

She made a crude hand gesture. Shane blinked at it. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Sara lay back on the bed and stretched. “But I wanted to harvest the elderberries from the back fence today.”

“Mmm.” Shane’s gaze was fixed out the east window. “And I was going to get Ryan to help me dig that pit today.”

Sara laughed and threw a leg over to straddle Shane. “Poor Ryan went to all that effort, and we’re going to do busywork all day?” 

“The pit is _not_ busywork, Sara-,” 

Sara kissed him to shut him up — a long-standing tradition in their relationship — and for all his talk about digging pits, he was hard against the crease of her thigh. 

Sparing a thought for the longevity of her IUD, Sara pulled aside her panties and leaned forward to kiss Shane. She adjusted her mount, and pressed back, drawing a harsh breath from Shane directly into her mouth. They set an easy rhythm at first, but Sara had suddenly gone from indifferent to painfully turned on, and she needed to up the ante. 

“Are you going to do as Ryan wishes and fuck me, or not?” Sara asked. It wasn’t the first time she’d invoked Ryan Bergara’s name in bed with Shane to get him worked up, and it wouldn’t be the last, but it worked like a dream this time. 

Shane groaned, gripped her ass and pushed up from the bed, and _yes_ this was what Sara needed. 

She rode Shane like that, with abandon, clenched her hands in his hair and rode him mercilessly, and babbled about Ryan, about Ryan barging back in, about Shane letting Ryan fuck her, about watching Shane touch Ryan, until she couldn’t take it anymore, and she ground down into Shane’s pelvic bone and came, shuddering, with Shane right behind her. 

— 

When Ryan came home they were still in bed, listening to the wind pick up, and the windchimes tinkling along with it. Shane heard Ryan knock a triplet before opening the door, the same as always, but he stilled in the doorway when he noticed them. Them, still laying curled up in the bed. Sara in an oversized t-shirt that had belonged to either Shane or Ryan at some point, but was so soft and stretched that it slipped from her left shoulder and barely clung to her right. Shane himself, in his briefs. The evidence of what they’d been up to was in the air, and Shane was breathless with the knowledge that he’d not too long ago come inside Sara while she hissed filth _about_ Ryan in his ear. The knowledge that his come was still leaking into her hastily repositioned underwear. 

Everything in the room paused, as Ryan made the connection, except for Shane’s thudding heart. He clenched his hands into fists under the sheets against the urge to open his mouth and start cracking jokes into the yawning silence of the room. He felt the tension like it was pressure, Ryan’s eyes couldn’t settle, flicking between Shane and Sara, then away to fix on the window over their heads. Shane couldn’t look away from Ryan, who was lit from behind by a weak late fall sun, and so beautiful as to seem impossible. 

Shane had never felt so useless as this; to finally reach absolute certainty that everything he needed was under this roof, in this room, next to him and in front of him, and to find himself utterly powerless to reach out and grasp it. 

Ryan was the one to shatter the aching intensity of that moment, sliding a foot backwards across the flagstones, back across the threshold. A sound that deafened. Shane’s heart ached for Ryan’s absence before he’d even left. 

“No,” Sara propped herself up on one elbow, stretched her other arm out to Ryan. “Come have a nap with us, come on.” 

God, she was incredible. The best of them, the smartest. 

“I- Sorry, I should have stayed out longer,” Ryan said, though he’d inched his foot back over the threshold. 

“Nope.” Shane clawed his voice back from wherever it had been banished. “It grows mighty cold out there, young man. Close that door this instant, before you catch your death.” 

Ryan snorted, but he took another step in, tugged the door shut. With the windchimes muffled, the silence was even headier than before. 

“I know it sounds like he’s been possessed by the ghost of the eccentric elderly aunt we commandeered this place from,” said Sara. “But what he means is that it’s far too cold and late in the day, and we missed you, so we’d like you to come nap, now, please.” 

“I should really process more firewood,” Ryan muttered, but he was toeing his boots off, and shrugging off his jacket. Shane’s heart pounded. 

“We’ll cut all the firewood you want after dinner,” he said, wiggling back to make a space. The space was at Shane’s front, and Sara’s back, and Shane could barely breathe as Ryan came to stand at the foot of the bed. 

They had always done this out of necessity before; they had slept in a huddle for comfort, and warmth, and safety, but today there was intention in the way Ryan crawled into that space and fit himself between them under the quilt. 

Shane thanked a nameless god for his long arms, long enough to reach over both Ryan and Sara and pull them in tight, safe.

He was almost asleep when Sara shifted, rolled to face Ryan and Shane. Ryan stiffened, but he didn’t move away.

“So where are all these incredible leaping salmon you caught for us today, Ryan?”

She hooked a leg over Ryan’s calf and from this close distance Shane could actually hear him swallow like a flustered little cartoon man. 

“I didn’t catch any,” Ryan replied. “Couldn’t find any.”

“Why, Ryan,” Shane said, catching Sara’s eye over Ryan’s shoulder. “I thought the streams were fairly packed with huge, majestic river beasts.” 

“Shut up, Shane.” Ryan knocked his head back into Shane in protest, but then he stayed there, tucked under Shane’s chin. When Shane fell asleep, Sara’s eyes were still open, and she looked right through him with her big, clear, brown eyes. 

— 

Ryan was fairly certain he’d never spent a birthday like this before; standing over a wild turkey with Sara and Shane, wondering how they were supposed to kill something they’d fed and watered for months, and was looking up at them with complete trust and adoration in its eyes. 

Or, well, Ryan wasn’t sure the dark, beady eyes of a turkey could really convey trust _or_ adoration, but Petey certainly didn’t seem frightened of the axe that hung from Sara’s hand. 

“We can’t do this,” he said eventually. 

“Nope,” Shane nodded fervently, and dropped to the ground to stroke his fingers over Petey’s head. 

“I knew this would happen,” said Sara, but she tossed the axe to the side and knelt in the dirt next to Shane. “Isn’t this why we named him Petey? So we would see him as obnoxious, and would never grow to love him?”

“Shouldn’t have named him at all,” Ryan groaned. They had eight chickens, now, and four quail, and every last one had a name, and none of them were likely to end up on the wood burning stove any time soon either.

So, his birthday dinner, which doubled as Thanksgiving, consisted mostly of squash, potatoes, and beans, and beets. They dug out some canned chicken from Maggie’s stores, and it was absolutely nothing like real Thanksgiving except that he had champagne (or, “champagne”, but who really cared about designations of origin at the end of the world?) and the wood stove made the cabin warm and glowing orange, and he was here with people he loved. So, it was exactly like Thanksgiving in many of the only ways that mattered. 

Their once-monthly consumption of alcohol meant that he was flat on his back by the bottom of his third glass, laid out on the flagstones to cool his back while Sara and Shane lay spread across the sofa nearby. They called out taglines for movies, made him guess the title. 

“Oh, oh, ‘heads will roll’!” Sara called, slipping down to the floor. Her champagne slopped from her glass and landed in the hollow of her collarbone.

“Too easy. Sleepy Hollow.” Ryan watched a trickle of champagne disappear beneath the neckline of Sara’s only hole-free button-up shirt. “You’ve got-” He flapped a hand around in front of his own chest. 

“Oh!” Sara peered down at herself. “Oh, no no no. I cannot wash this shirt again, it actually will not survive another beating.” 

Ryan must have been even more drunk than he realized, must have missed some crucial minutes. How else could he explain the absurdity of Sara unbuttoning her shirt to lay it on the arm of the sofa nearest the stove, and lay back down next to Ryan in her charmingly tatty blue bra. 

Ryan wasn’t stupid, so when he lifted his eyes to find Shane watching him closely with a soft smile and eyebrows raised, Ryan felt- almost _heard_ something click into place. 

“Is one of you going to tell me what’s going on?” He asked. Sara took an unsteady breath and shifted around next to him, but Ryan didn’t move his eyes from Shane’s.

“Ryan,” Shane started. “You know that we- we love you so much, bud.”

Which was all the explanation Ryan got, before receiving half a lapful of Sara, drawing him in to a kiss. 

It had been so many long months since he’d felt anything like this, and it also occurred to him that he’d _never_ felt anything quite like this. It was incredibly singular to kiss her, to feel Sara’s hand reach up and scrape through his hair, to feel her deepen it. He’d never dared imagine this, yet it was precisely how he had imagined it, peripherally, when his conscious brain wasn’t paying attention. 

More unique yet was opening his eyes to find Shane, on the ground now, with his back against the sofa and legs thrown wide. Ryan searched his eyes for resentment, jealousy, but he found only affection and heat.

Kissing Sara, letting his hand slide up the bare skin of her back was excruciating pleasure after all this time, but it wasn’t a complete pleasure; Ryan was so used, now, to Sara’s casual and affectionate touch being accompanied by Shane’s wary and solicitous touch. To be without it now felt beyond wrong.

“Did you have anything to contribute, big guy?”

Shane hesitated for a lingering moment, long enough for Ryan to wonder if he’d read this all wrong, long enough to back out, as if that was even a choice, and then all at once Shane moved. 

Suddenly, instead of Sara’s soft weight along his right side, he had Shane all over him; a heavy weight from chest-to-thighs, and big hands that took his head gently and pulled it up to join their lips together. 

Shane seemed to be begging forgiveness with his mouth for every time he’d refrained from reaching out to touch Ryan with intention. Shane kissed like he could absorb every hurt Ryan had ever felt. 

Shane dipped to press his face and tongue into Ryan’s throat, and Sara took up his post at Ryan’s lips. Ryan was ascending. Someone worked his pants and jocks down, but he wasn’t sure who. Sara was the one to ask “is this okay?” against his lips, then. 

Ryan could only laugh, and nod, and bury his face in his hands.

They took turns working him over, at first, bringing him to the brink over and over until he was almost in tears. Shane’s hands spanned almost the length of him, and Sara’s fingers were soft and quick. Then, as if they hadn’t had enough of torturing him, Shane straddled Ryan’s thighs, and Sara knelt over his chest, and Shane reached around to press his middle and index fingers on her clit, moving in little rolling circles. Behind her, Ryan could make out Shane’s other hand pulling over his cock in long, measured strokes. And both of them, eyes fixed on Ryan below.

He was so oversensitized, so overwhelmed by the visual stimulus that he felt on the verge of blackout. 

When Ryan finally came, it was to the sight of Shane’s come painting Sara’s thighs, and Ryan’s own chest. With the lightest touch from Sara’s hand, he let go. 

The three of them came to rest as they always did, tucked tightly together in a row, in the bed they had been sharing for months, arms and legs and hearts entangled. This, at least, was the same as ever. 

— 

_Winter_

As she hoisted a rucksack over her shoulder and plucked Maggie’s Old Crossbow from the table, Shane began to suspect that Sara was pulling a classic Bergara romantic frame-up. 

“I think I’ll be gone most of the day,” she called over her shoulder, halfway down the drive before Shane could exchange a baffled glance with Ryan. “Don’t wait up. Do something fun!”

“Be safe!” Ryan called after her as she hopped the gate as if she wasn’t 5’5 on the very best of days. And then they were alone, with hours to kill, and Sara’s explicit direction to have fun.

So, they dug a hole. 

When Shane was a child, the absolute height of joy could be found in scraping at the hard soil in his parents’ yard. That had been hard and grainy dirt, and too frozen most of the year to get much enjoyment out of. In his fantasies, he had soft earth, and he could dig down just as far as he needed. In his imagination, he dug out a labyrinth of tunnels, opening out into room after room of varying heights and depths. 

Now, Shane was 35, and there was a spot in the westernmost corner where the land banked sharply, and Shane knew his eight-year-old self would think it a mighty fine prospect for a clubhouse.

Before, Shane would have googled it — _how to prevent dirt cave from collapsing_ — but they had no such resources now. As much as Shane missed the ability to win an argument about what year Madonna released _Material Girl_ , he couldn’t forget that it was only here, in this google-free reality, that he could take an entire day to dig a clubhouse (they’d described it to Sara as a shelter, and Ryan had mentioned the word ‘bunker’, but they both knew what it really was) out from the soft dirt in the middle of the forest with his best friend. 

Without Google, they assumed that any false move would bury them alive, and proceeded with caution, reinforcing with wooden logs and hardening with water at every step.

It took three hours just to carve out the shape and size of the entrance, despite the softness of the rich volcanic soil. Maybe it was slow work because they stopped constantly to joke and laugh and start bits that ran far too long. Maybe it was slow work because Ryan had stripped his shirt off an hour in, and had hiked his shorts up to mid-thigh as he crouched to press and shape the dirt around the opening with his hands. Shane was still in awe of Ryan’s body, which had hardened and grown from months of hauling water and chopping wood, and Shane stopped constantly to watch the ripple of muscles on his back as he smoothed out the surface of the dirt.

Eventually, when Ryan had exhausted his body and Shane had exhausted his self-control, he dragged Ryan down to the river, stripped him off, rinsed the drying mud from his body. It was fucking freezing, but they found enough warmth on the banks of the river, clinging together in the pale sun, thrusting together until they were gasping into each other’s mouths. 

They dressed and lay in the soft clover for what felt like hours, afterwards. It was strange, Shane thought, to be best friends for so long, and find a new favourite expression on Ryan’s face.

Just as it was getting too cold to stay outside, Shane heard the sound of Sara gripping the gate, vaulting it, landing with a soft thud. 

“Sara?” Ryan sat up, suddenly pale. Shane whipped his head around toward the drive and lost his breath. 

Sara walked toward them, trailing Maggie’s Old Crossbow and her machete, which was bright red with blood. In fact there was blood all over her, bright splashes on her jeans and jumper, and matting her hair. Shane scrambled to his feet, but Ryan was already off sprinting. He had his arms out as if to pull her into a tight embrace but she ducked him. 

_“_ Stop, _stop_ , I’m fine!” She yelped. “Are you an idiot? Don’t touch me, you’ll be contaminated.”

“Are you hurt?” Shane was breathless as he jogged up to her. He wanted desperately to run his hands over her limbs and search for injuries, but she was right: now that he was close, he could tell just how much blood coated her clothing. 

“Sara,” he breathed. 

“Don’t,” Sara responded sharply. She was shivering. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay. I just need your help to get this-” She plucked at her jumper. Tears welled up and spilled down her face. 

Shane and Ryan ran the bath and when it didn’t get hot enough, they boiled pans of water and dumped them in. They peeled the clothes off Sara, wiped the worst from her skin with a bucket and a rag, and put her in the tub with Jackie’s good soap. She was flawless, spotless, and unhurt.

Shane and Ryan sat on either side like twin gargoyles while Sara’s breathing evened out, and her shivering subsided. It was many long minutes before she took a deep breath.

“They’ve breached the state border somewhere,” she said. “And I came across a few of them. I got lucky. They were so weak.”

“I can’t leave here,” Shane said, unable to hold it in. “I don’t want to leave yet.”

“Where would we even go?” Ryan asked. 

“ _Nowhere,”_ Sara sat up and gripped them both by the arm. “We’re not leaving. We’re just going to make this place a fucking fortress, and if they find their way out here, we’ll just wait them out.”

This place was it for Shane. This was his sanctuary. He intended to live out his days tending the land here, with Ryan and Sara, and protecting it. It was either that, or-

Outside, a bitter wind rattled the branches of the dogwood tree.


End file.
